Chapter 1: The Night They Found Him
The first touch came at 2:47 a.m.
Howard knew the time because he'd been staring at the digital clock on his nightstand for the past three hours, watching the numbers change with the kind of desperate attention usually reserved for bomb defusal. Sleep wouldn't come. It hadn't come for days now, not since the woods started whispering.
Not whispering. That was wrong. The woods didn't whisper. They watched.
He lay rigid beneath a threadbare blanket that smelled like dust and old sweat, every muscle coiled tight as a bear trap. The windows were closed. The door was locked. The cheap security light he'd bought from the hardware store blazed orange through the blinds, casting everything in that sickly sodium glow that turned his small bedroom into something resembling a crime scene photograph.
Nothing moved.
Everything moved.
The first touch landed on his forearm—so light he almost dismissed it as a draft, except the windows were closed, sealed shut with weather stripping he'd installed himself two winters ago when the heating bills got so high he'd considered burning his furniture for warmth.
Then came the second touch. Third. Fourth.
They landed like raindrops. Tiny. Deliberate. Wrong.
Howard's jaw clenched so hard his teeth creaked. He didn't move. Didn't open his eyes. Didn't give them the satisfaction. He'd learned that much over the past two nights—any reaction, any sound, any acknowledgment only made it worse. They fed on it. Thrived on it. The little bastards would giggle and chirp and press their minuscule hands against his skin until he wanted to crawl out of his own body.
A shimmer of iridescent light flickered behind his closed eyelids. Pale green shifting to gold. The color of something that had no business existing in the real world.
Don't open your eyes, he told himself. Don't look. If you don't look, they're not real.
A tiny weight settled on his chest, directly over his sternum. It couldn't have been more than a few ounces, but it felt like a boulder. Like the entire weight of the forest pressing down on his ribcage.
"Howard."
The voice was a chime. A bell made of honey and mischief. It spoke his name like it was a joke only they understood.
He didn't answer.
"He's pretending to sleep again." Another voice, higher pitched. Giggles rippled through the air like wind chimes in a storm.
"Let him pretend." That was Pip. Howard knew his voice now, the way you knew the sound of your own heartbeat. "Pretending is half the fun."
Something danced across his cheekbone. Tiny feet. Bare. Warm.
Howard's hands stayed pinned at his sides, fingers twisted in the blanket. He could feel sweat beading along his hairline, trickling down his temple. His breath came shallow and controlled through his nose.
They're not real. They're not real. They're not—
A high-pitched laugh exploded directly in his ear, and he flinched.
The dam broke.
They descended on him like a swarm.
Tiny hands skittered across his neck. Fingers—dozens of them, hundreds of them—danced along his collarbone, his ribs, the soft vulnerable skin beneath his arms. The blanket was suddenly useless, a joke, no barrier at all to creatures who could slip through the gaps like smoke.
Howard bit down on his lip until he tasted copper. His body jerked once, twice, a marionette with cut strings. A strangled sound crawled up his throat and he swallowed it back down, choking on it.
"Did you hear that?" Pip's voice came from somewhere near his left ear. Close. Too close. "I think he almost made a sound."
"He's holding back," said the higher voice. The one Howard had started calling Bells. "I don't like it when they hold back."
"Patience," Pip purred. "He's learning.